Some pictures of Diana and Myself, where we now live and places around us, things that we find interesting, amusing or just plain weird!

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

I Thought This Was A Neat Idea,

for anyone wanting to keep fit and use a bicycle,

but not wishing to brave the traffic on public roads or spend their exercise time looking at a blank wall, Aaron Puzey had been
toiling away on his exercise bike for half an hour a day for years when he
decided to look for a way to make it a bit more fun, so he set out to build an app for the
Samsung Galaxy Gear VR headset which would allow him to hook it up to Google
Streetview and make it seem like he’s cycling through different real-life
locations, His ultimate goal? To cycle the entire length of the UK 1,500 kilometres
from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without actually leaving his home, building
the custom app to download the 3D data from Street View and make it viewable in
the VR headset was the toughest part of his project, other than that, all he
needed to do was tape a Bluetooth cadence monitor to his exercise bike to
measure its RPM and send the data to the Samsung Galaxy VR as instructions to
advance through his route,

the good news is that he can now basically cycle anywhere in
the world! Of course the app does not take into account the extra effort needed
to tackle hills, but I guess with some tweaks a certain amount of resistance
could be applied to the stationary bicycle when going uphill, above is a video
of some of his journey, and you can follow it on on his blog, Cycle VR,
updating the site with edited video highlights of every 100 kilometres, He says
he's been lengthening the amount of time he dedicates to the journey, and
reckons he'll be finished in around 50 days, so hopefully a company will
develop the idea so that some one as computer dumb as me could link all of the
above up easily, especially to increase resistance on hills and who knows link
the whole thing up to a variable speed electric fan to feel the wind in your
hair!